Posts Tagged ‘theme:cycles’

The first week of February falls neatly midway between the Winter solstice and the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. It is around this time that the very earliest hints of a coming spring make themselves known, though these promising signs can feel bittersweet when one recalls that there are still several weeks of winter yet ahead.

Holidays including Imbolc, Candlemas and Groundhog Day all share certain common roots that intrigue me.

Photo of an Imbolc festival in West Yorkshire by Steven Earnshaw.

As an at least nominally educated human, I know this much about ocean tides: They happen about twice a day, get real exciting in places like Nova Scotia and Mt. St. Michel France, and that they have to do with the moon. You want a low one when going razor clamming. You want to get out of the way for high ones. In pursuit of my cyclical madness, I decided to learn a bit more about tides.

Tree stumps are as reliable for recording dates as they are physically sturdy: a year per ring, a simple way to count off the decades. So it must have been quite perplexing for early stump-scientists (so-called “dendrochronologists” in the modern parlance of the discipline) when they started tallying up the rings for the 19th century.

If you look at the stump of any hardwood in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, it will seem that 1816 never happened.

It is a strange thought to consider: what if, right now, it was simultaneously ten days ago in Alaska? Such that if you dispatched a postcard to Juneau, it would likely, in the eyes of the recipient, arrive from the future? Or, to ask an Englishman what happened on the 17th of September, 1752 only to have him respond—truthfully— that the day never happened? What began as a 16th-century Catholic exercise to fix a lagging Easter date became the nearly universally-adopted calendar system to this day.

Photo by counting chest bullets

As mentioned in my post on phenology, I’ve been considering cycles lately. Seasons. Rotations. Circles. Calendars. Orbits. In the next while, perhaps a month or so, I’ll be highlighting content that carries this theme.

Let’s get something straight first. It’s important not to confuse phenology with phonology (linguistically relevant chunks of sound). Nor am I referring to phrenology, with its quackery, skull bumps and excuses for racism. Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life cycle stages—many of these events are sensitive to climatic variation and change.

Photo by Anita363